On Sat, Sep 24, 2011 at 10:05 PM, Graham Percival <gra...@percival-music.ca> wrote: >> > If I was writing a "make" system from scratch, I would describe >> > dependencies in data structures that are viewable and editable, and >> > have a separate program that uses those structures to determine which >> > files need making. >> >> I'm not sure why you need extra structures for that? For C/C++, gcc can >> figure out the dependencies as a side effect of compiling the normal >> source code; and this can be done for most other languages as well. Very >> few non-trivial programs actually maintain their dependencies by hand >> nowadays... > > That's a great comfort for our lilypond texinfo documentation, > which *does* require explicit dependencies. > > As far as I know, every single build system has trivially easy > support for C/C++ compilation. That's not an issue. The issue is > building documentation, building swig python modules (for me > personally, not lilypond), generating translations, generating > test cases and automatically showing potential problems, etc. > > According to > find . -name "*.make" -or -name "GNUmakefile*" | xargs cat | wc -l > we have 5059 lines of build-system stuff. Actually, that's not > counting python helper scripts: > wc scripts/build/*.py -l > 4113 total > > So... 9171 lines of build-system junk. I think this meme is > appropriate: > It's over NINE THOUSAND!!! > > This didn't happen for fun and giggles. Over the years, we've > built up hack upon hack, and ended up with this unholy mess. Is > that purely the fault of autotools? No. Could it be *worse* if > we used a different build system? Sure. But it could also be > *better* if we used a different build system.
You sound spoiled. * The build scripts are not really part of the complexity of the build system. They are normal programs, they are just not intended to be run by end users. I assume you are not considering a rewrite of output-distance.py in CMake's scripting language. * You make 5000 lines of makefile sound as if it is a lot. I think you should look at other packages' build systems more closely. For example, coreutils, which is 70k lines of C, and a trivial documtentation and test process has, count'dem: 2000 lines of Makefile.am. This is for just linking together a bunch of bog-standard C object files, generating an info page, and running some shell scripts as tests. I think 5k lines is pretty impressive for a package as complex as LilyPond, considering that it has a bizarre documentation process, translated docs, python bindings, fonts that are run through metapost and fontforge, a complex regression test, and needs weird acrobatics to find its gazilion different init files. -- Han-Wen Nienhuys - han...@xs4all.nl - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
